Decoding the Gurus - Lab Leak Fever with Philipp Markolin

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Join Matt and Chris as they dive into the controversy-ridden world of the lab leak theory, accompanied by biochemist-turned-author Philipp Markolin. Philipp details his journey into the abyss of lab leak lore and sensationalist media, documenting how thorough research was pushed aside in favour of conspiratorial discourse. For those who dream of a world where science triumphs over sensationalism, this episode is your bittersweet symphony.LinksPhilipp's SubstackLab Leak Fever Book SiteNew Documentary Movie about the Lab LeakOur previous episode on the Lab LeakBad Boy of Science: Sam Gregson's channel that includes many interviews with Philipp and relevant scientists

Hello and welcome to the coding the couriers. The podcast were a psychologist and an anthropologist, listen to various online gurus and associated weirdos, talk about nonsense and work out what they're trying to say. In today's episode, we don't have a decoding. This is not a supplementary material. It is a interview episode. We have somebody that will hopefully be more sensible than the majority of the gurus that we cover. It's a low bar. It's a low bar. But first, Hello, Matt. Who is that? We didn't know to join us. Wow. So with us is Dr. Philip Markelen. Philip has got a background in biochemistry. He's from the fair state of, well, you live in Switzerland now, don't you?

But you're not originally from Switzerland. It's Austrian, like Hitler. Oh, yeah, like Hitler. Beautiful countryside, though. Show about the politics. But, you know, Philip has shared our interest in monitoring the discourse over the lab leak situation. I know everyone else has forgotten about it now, but we cannot let these things go.

We're still interested in the discourse around lab leak. Did it come from a lab? Did it come from natural sources and the disconnect, seemingly, between the voices of credential scientists who actually work in this area and almost everybody else. So Philip has written a book called Lab Leak Fever

and he's released it just recently and has currently come aboard the good ship decoding the gurus to tell us about it. I welcome, Philip. Hi, thanks so much for finally having this conversation more publicly. I think I've been in your Patreon feeds a few times. And Chris always likes to say, ah, Philip, come on, let's talk to all our people without any context.

So I always feel a bit pushed. But yeah, it's nice to do this. And I mean, as you know, you have been interviewed properly also from my side for part of the book, or at least to give some context on the gurus that have been involved in spreading anti-science myths specifically surrounding the lab league, amplifying certain actors that maybe are not most closely related to what the science actually says. And yeah, and how this all fits together is basically what I looked into in the book. So what drove you to write it? I mean, it's a big job writing a book as me and Chris know. We've been trying to write our own book.

and we're not getting terribly farts mainly chris's fault but so it's a big job what what sort of drove you to feel like you had to write it so i mean i i never really wanted to write a book about this i never really wanted to participate in this it it really kind of you know you get captured a little bit i got interested in it in social media i was writing a blog about it and then there was some pushback from you know a lap league enthusiasts i would say that was not very nice in the sense of like Philip, you're a shield for China or for EcoHealth Alliance or whatever. When I was having just saying, hey, I'm a genetic engineer, at least I have some experiences there.

And it didn't seem to me that this was an engineered virus. It doesn't mean it didn't come from the lab, but at least, you know, all the arguments brought forward in 2021 about this was an engineered virus, didn't seem to make much sense from my personal scientific experience, working with viral constructs. This doesn't make sense. I was also not the originate of this. There was another science communicator called Sam Gregson. He pulled me on and basically said, hey, let's interview a few virologists

and see what they have to say about some of these allegations pertaining to their work and virology. And this is what got me started. And, you know, it would have ended right there. We would have had a bunch of interviews and the story would have ended. However, on the world stage, things escalated with this Laptic story. I also got kind of picked up by an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. And he basically said, you know, he read my blog and he wants me to fly out to Southeast Asia,

go meet the barologists that, you know, do the bat sampling and, you know, go to the caves and interview them there as part of his documentary into the origins. And this is basically what brought me into deeper context with some of the key scientific protagonists in this controversy. And at some point in 2023, I decided, look, I've interviewed now, you know, people involved in this, I understand enough of the science to give a bit of a good breakdown of it to really write a book and tell their side of the story and this is what I wanted to do. But in order to tell a book, you have to give a bit of an angle. So I did something different, which is basically

that I would also contrast not only the protagonists, which is like many different scientific protagonists when they did a key discovery, but also what happened kind of in our information and social media online ecosystem in response to their findings. And so I kind of had a lot of antagonists. And this kind of told the story. This is what the scientists find and this is how the antagonist directed to have a bit of a storytelling element in this. And this is basically the book. And for the antagonists, of course, we can talk about this maybe a bit later. It's not easy to write a book that also features an honest look at antagonists. Gurus are some of these antagonists because the lawyers very quickly start getting very icky about, you know, you naming names about

people not being very forthcoming and honest with what they're doing. Actually, when you were explaining there, I was thinking, Matt, in some ways, you're like a sweet summer child because of your desire to stay away from the discourse. Because you mentioned, you know, the lab leak, it's kind of like, it's not at top of the news right now and that, but it never, it has never went away. It's never been out of the cycle, especially with Trump there. And it's now essentially like dogma in the heterodox world that, you know, it is all but proved that it was originally a lab lick and that everybody was vindicated.

I mean, very recently, Josh Shep's, his most recent episode, is interviewing a person about the evidence for the lablich. Now, admittedly, the positive sign related to Josh is that he is interviewing someone who is making the case that the evidence stacks up for not being a lab lick. he's kind of doing the just asking question things, but the point is he's doing that because that's the dominant position. So yeah, so related to that, Philip, based on what you explained as well, I am kind of curious about this and don't know it that throughout the whole pandemic and on Twitter before Musk and after Musk and so on, I saw you very much, you know, as somebody like that was

willing to dig in and, you know, you produced detailed blog. blog posts setting out the evidence. You were going back and forth with various nefarious characters on Twitter in Lablich World. And you were like a main villain for that whole ecosystem. And I hear everything you said to Matt there, but I am just like curious why. Because, you know, like Matt and I are advocate for science. We covered the topic as well.

But like our reserves also are not unlimited. in that respect. And just like with people fighting anti-vaxxers, I'm kind of curious, how did you become that you were so involved with this and unwilling to, like, put the work in to rebut that because it's not like you are a paid eco-health, like, to my knowledge. So, not yet proven, at least. Yeah, it's an interesting question. Of course, I ask myself, I mean, I have a family, I have a full-time job, you know, why put in so much time and effort? in trying to correct this one thing, this one little thing that seems to be so prominently wrong about the public discourse. And I don't know if I have a good answer, but I think one of the answers for sure is that I got to know a lot of the virologists.

I put myself and also got put by luck and other circumstances in a situation where I was the one that held multiple kind of threats in my hands that nobody else seems to have. which is, you know, I had a lot of unheard testimony from primary sources. I had the right scientific background to understand the many complexities on this topic. It's not just about virology. Sometimes it goes into, you know, genetic engineering. It goes into bioinformatics, sequencing analysis. It goes also into a lot of, you know, psychology and other features that, you know, how is science communicated in public?

how is trust reflected in public. And you had scientists on, you had Christian Anderson and Mike Warrebee and Eddie Holmes. They are very gifted science communicators on top of being excellent scientists. And somehow they were not able to break through. And so for me, it's also a little bit about correcting the record and giving the scientists another chance to have the voices heard maybe in a different setup than they usually get. and this is what the book is about. So the book is written basically like a novel. So people can just read it like a novel, but it's a nonfiction narrative format.

And they will just relive the story, the controversy from the start. What happened in Wuhan? I talked to the head of the Chinese CDC, George Gao. I talked to the woman in the Wuhan Institute of Arology, Shangli-Shu. And I think I'm the only person that ever did that, or at least the only person in the West that ever managed to do this. and don't ask me about how I had to be creative to get this access. But I feel like, you know, if you have this unique access

and you hear this unique testimony and see their side, it would be good to do something with it, to write what I perceive as an historic injustice, what happened to the scientists. So there's a bit of a moral obligation. I also personally, I think my, and I think you pointed this out, for me, science is something that's a bit like a higher ideal.

And I felt like science came so much under pressure based on this lab-leg narrative that has not a lot of evidence or has no evidence to support it where all the evidence points in the other direction, it just didn't seem fair to me that public trust is lost based on actions from actors that are not based in evidence, that are not based even in reasonable doubt, but really in more, I would say, other motives that are more political, more psychological to a certain extent, not saying everybody is like, you know, a great manipulator. Some people just wanted a bit of a cleaner answer that science was not able to provide in the moment, right? But we are not in 2020 anymore. We are now 2025. Science has done

a lot of work. And this is also what the book captures. The initial uncertainty, how things evolved and how the uncertainties narrowed over time by doing more research. And just telling the story, laying it out, I think was very important to me to have this somewhere. I mean, I like that about the book. It definitely does have that sort of narrative. And one of the things that interested me is the personalities involved, like you said. And the scientists and researchers before the sort of great brouhaha, the great cataclysm of discourse descended upon them and their very narrow field of speciality. I found their individual careers and the things that they'd done as virus hunters, as people trying to prevent infectious disease, pretty

remarkable. Did you want to tell us about just a few of the things that stood out to you in terms of their interesting personal stories? Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, this is absolutely true. there is these researchers, they all have, you know, remarkable backstories and you're not doing them justice by just saying, ah, they are Chinese shills or whatever, when some of them, you know, have a long history either of dissenting from Chinese authorities or having, being very individualistic or doing work for the public good that is not, you know, financially rewarding. So think about, let's start maybe with Christian Anderson, right? He has been working, you know, in Western Africa, going there to the field labs when they had a lasa fever outbreaks,

a devastating disease or Ebola specifically, right? I mean, these are people that really live and breathe for public health and doing public health services. And, you know, the idea that they are easily swayed because Tony Fauci told them, you know, I don't, you know, we're all going to, I don't know, cover up this. It's just absurd given that what these people stand for in their lives.

A lot of the book features, of course, the virus hunters that discovered the first SARS, the origin of the first SARS virus from 2003. This is Peter Dashag, Schengli Scher, and Linfawang, Linfawang from Singapore, Schengli from the Buchan Institute of Ravrology, and Peter Daschak is the former president of ECHURS Alliance. EECO alliance does not exist anymore given the political pressures they received. And they have been basically working decades trying to map and understand where do novel sonotic viruses like SARS come from. They were, you know, they were developing research programs trying to figure out how do you even get to SARS, right?

And then, you know, if you talk to Shangri-Shea, for example, they really had to kind of, you know, China is a huge place. There are billions of bats, right? And they didn't even know that SARS came from bats. So how do you even start, right? They started with random sampling of bats. They couldn't find anything. Then they tried to look not only for the PCR primer tests, which are very short-lived to catch acute infections. they had to develop antibody tests to look for kind of more lingering antibodies in the blood

of bats and then they didn't know which species of beds so they had to test different species of bed first they thought it would be in fruit bats these are very large bats that can you know have a wingspan up for two meters because all the other viruses that jumped over in in recent history like a nipa like hendra the hour came from fruit beds and turns out sarscovito doesn't come from fruit beds but from these ranophilus bats which is the ones that have this weird, freaky, horrific noses, which of course is not because they are ugly, but because evolution adapted to them having very specific echolocation. And they basically, you know, they stumbled upon them by just, let's test this new antibody

essay on the local horseshoe beds. And then, oh, we got a signal. And then they drilled down. They went to all 28 provinces in China, Shanglisha, and then they landed in Yunnan, ultimately, and saying this is where the closest relative of the original Saswai. as was. And then they did, you know, years of longitudinous services until they drilled down into this one cave called the Shito Cave outside of Kung Ming. And there they found basically that all the genetic elements that would ultimately constitute the first SARS virus were in this

cave, but in different viruses. So what was going on there? Why you find these different elements? And what they discovered was basically that recombination. So the genetics exchange of elements between viruses was an evolutionary driver of creating ever new potentially very dangerous viruses for humans. And this is basically where they started. And this is then why did it these experiments that later would be objected to and mischaracterized by, ah, why did the word on chimeric viruses? Because nature creates, you know, millions of chimeric viruses and they wanted to just create in the lab some of these mechanisms to understand how much danger they really posed. And this is also why they have been warning since 2013 latest and, you know, every year after that the new SARS-related

coronavirus is going to spill over, given that we are driving more human and bad interactions, that, you know, bats interact also with our livestock. And this is a reasonable path that SARS was not the first one. SARS-CoB-2 will come. And potentially SARS-Co-3 might come to in the future. Unfortunately, that's the sad part of this. One thing to mention is, like, I think you have done admirable job, you know, of helping to amplify a bunch of the scientists. Like, I mean, I believe you put us in contact with Christian Eddie and Michael Warburne originally, right? So, like, we owe that episode to you, vouching for us as non-miniacs. Oh, and Chris, by the way, since we're doing shout-outs, I wanted to shout out Sam Gregson,

who Phil mentioned earlier. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's the bad boy of science and has a physics channel. And, yeah, he's someone else who also has a, his past. passionate about the same kinds of things. Yeah, and if you look online, you can see Philip and him interviewing a lot. Maybe a bit of a package like you and Matt. Yeah, that we're talking about.

And he's similarly vilified by the Lablick community. So I think we're going to get into the impacts on the individual scientists and a little bit more of the story and also the online community around Lablich and all that kind of thing. But I'm just thinking for our audience, for people who might not have been keeping track of this issue, right? And they just have it bubbling around in the discourse. They see it, you know, show up whenever Bill Moore or Joe Rogan or whatever is talking about it. And you mentioned, you know, we're not in 2020 anymore. We're in 2025. So it would be unfair to do this to anyone else, but I feel like in your case, I'm allowed to do it. So can you give

a nutshell summary of where the evidence lies and the consensus position in the scientific arena for the like zoonotic origin versus lab leak and where it lies. And then maybe if it's not asking too much, were you view the general public opinion on that issue versus like the scientific evidence? Yes. I think the first thing to say, and this is important to say, is that, you know, people believing that the lab leak is possible is not a weird or, you know, out there. This is something that even scientists in early 2020 took very seriously, including people like Christian Anderson that you had on. So per se that a novel virus could have escaped from a lab that collected bad samples is a reasonable hypothesis. And there has been a lot of

retconning about, you know, how scientists tried to suppress even just discussing this when in effect there's no support to do this. In fact, scientists were looking into this hypothesis early on. However, immediately, and we're not talking about January, 2021, we're talking about March 2020. There were already some, I would say, indications that most likely this is another natural virus, not an artificially created virus. And we can talk about, you know, when you look at the genome, you would see an artificially created virus would be often easy to spot just because you can see human intervention in the viral genome. This is one of the indications. The other of the indications is that you might find some features. that are hard to explain outside of nature, or you might find viruses and, you know,

people discovered very early some viruses in viral databases that were found pre-pandemic, that seemed to be very close to SARS-CoV2, the famous pangolin viruses for people that join this discussion or heard about it, that very soon make clear that, you know, the genetic elements constituting this novel virus I actually found in nature and we have no records of any lab ever possessing them. So this is kind of how it shook down, I would say, after the first few months of uncertainty, this is how it shook down. However, given that the pandemic was escalating over time, you had, you know, half of the

scientific community, at least in biology, starting to work on SARS-COVID-2 related topics, not only, you know, epidemiology and trying to, you know, navigate the pandemic, but also mechanistically, how does this virus work? What does it do to us? Historically, people went out more bad samples. I'm being keen to find bad relatives of this as well. So there were multiple programs, not just the Wuhan Institute of Aerology, there was the Institute Buster.

There was Ellis Hughes, for example, working in Shinshu Obana. So Alice Hughes is a young professor, a very famous bat hunters, I would say. But she's, you know, our age, and she has a remarkable story. So it's one of my favorite chapters is Chapter 5, which basically talks about her and her work in Shingshuabana, where she really, you know, at the time when Shangri-she was put on the stand for having a close relative of SARS-CoV-2, Red G-13, she actually had found closer-related bad viruses in Xinxiaabana in her backyard, basically in this botanical garden in Yunnan. She found four close-related bad viruses, making it very clear that, you know, the virus is most

likely natural in origin and not artificially created. But just to break it down a bit more to the audience, while the suspicion that the the virus could have come over lab is, you know, there are many scenarios, is reasonable. We have to at some point also talk about what is known. And I feel like a lot of what happened in this discourse is that everything that has been known about the virus, everything that points in a certain direction has been ignored for as long as the scientists are saying, yes, in theory, it's still possible that the virus came from a lab, you know, because this is not something like math where you do one proof, one experiment,

and that's it. So this is not how outbreak investigations work. Outbreak investigations work differently. You start collecting data. You have to analyze it carefully. You have to get bits and pieces here and there and see, you know, what do they point to? And for a long time, I would say until 2022, until Michael Vorubi and Christian Anderson and the others published, you know, very detailed studies about the market origin, I would say

a lot of the Lablich discourse was a bit of God of that. the gaps because people were like, okay, it's possible. We cannot close it scientifically, so we have to keep asking the question. We have to keep looking into this. And these dynamics, of course, persisted, although the scientific evidence quickly caught up. So in 2021, just to give you some highlights, we got closer virus ancestors of SARS-COVID. We discovered the RPD in Beds in Laos in 2021, I think it was September or something, of 2021.

This was Institute Pasteur, which basically has this key for human infection, the RNA binding domain in the virus that can enable the virus to infect human cells via the ACE2 receptor. This was discovered one-to-one basically in bats. So clearly, this element that we have never seen in a lab before that we could not really have designed in a lab because SARS-1 used a very different mechanism than SARS-2, suddenly this key to human infection was discovered in beds. laws, right? Again, strongly pointing to a natural origin for this capability in viruses. LSU has discovered a few other close relatives that kind of for the first two-thirds of the genome part, we have a closer match than RATG-13. So the closest virus, Shanglishi ever had in her lab, basically got out-competed by viruses we found in the wild by other researchers, independent researchers. So this again points that R-R-A-T-G-13 was not kind of modified and, you know, cultured in a

way that then created SarsCoV2. This is actually not possible. If we learned about recombination, this is also something we only learned later. Once we saw more viruses come online, people could do better comparison. They could find out recombination histories and really drill down saying, okay, this is a natural genome. This is all in 2021. And then in 2022, what happened is basically the WHO mission also happened in 2021. And they already made their assessment saying, we think the market is the most likely scenario. We cannot exclude, you know, the cold chain. We cannot exclude the LEPLIP, but we think this is rather unlikely. And then in 2022 came the market analysis paper where people really looked inside the market

and outside of the market, how did the virus spread? And I mean, you had a two-hour conversation. I'm not going to be able to give any more input than that. But I think they made a very compelling case taking different genetic, phylogenetic, geographic time epidemic simulation data together. and they all align on this picture that there were multiple spillovers at this wet market called Who and Unmarket. And I think this really closed the door of a lot of Lablich speculations because if the virus first starts in this market, spilled over in this market and created two different lineages spreading outward from this market,

the idea that the lab somehow is responsible for this is very much diminished. So it's very much in the area of this might be a freak accident. that does not really match with any other data. So this is kind of where we stood in 2022. And then after that, of course, people kind of tried to slice the salami even thinner. They looked into the market. So Chinese authorities were denying that there was anything in the market that could have caused the pandemic. It turns out they were not truthful about this.

There were susceptible species. You might have heard about the raccoon dogs, but there were also other species like, you know, Amur hedgehogs and some badgers and some other animals that could conceivably have carried this virus into the market and, you know, spread it to humans from there. And people found, you know, genetic disposition from animals co-located with virus-positive samples. They found that in the stall where the animals were housed, the environmental samples were very positive compared to any other place in the market. They found that in the sewers where the animals, you know, animals in China, Chinese wet markets,

they get butchered, you know, cut open the gut splashed down on the floor. They have open sewers to just wash it away. And you find, of course, that this is where a lot of virus positivity was from environmental sampling in the end. And also in a store that had no associated human case. So you have a very plausible, and I would say you cannot disprove the sonotic hypothesis that it started at the market anymore. Despite the scientists trying to disprove, right, science always tries to disprove. They try to disprove the market by saying, could it have been an ascertainment bias? Could it have been that the Chinese authorities preferentially sampled there?

And when you look at the facts, this is, you know, they tried to disprove the market and just made the argument for the market stronger and stronger. So at this point, we have no conceivable way to disprove the market anymore. We have susceptible animals in the right place, in the right time, having genetic dispositions, showing signs of the animals themselves in their genetic disposition. They look at the transcripts and they see the animals were most likely sick and leave a transcriptomic profile that looked like, you know, a transcriptomic profile we would get from virus infections similar to coronaviruses. So it's very hard to make the argument that we can completely discard all of this evidence just in favor of what if, you know, it came from the lap and somehow migrated silently in Wuhan and we missed everything and then it surfaced not once but twice in this market. So it's a very tricky argument to make from a plausibility standpoint and runs contradictory to all the evidence. And it's still piecemeal evidence. It's not perfect evidence because we never have perfect evidence and outbreak investigations.

But it runs counter to this. So this was 2022, 2023, even 2024. There was some other mechanistic studies done as well in 2022 that I want to mention around the furying cleavage site and some other data found around the foreign cleavage site. So the foreign cleavage site is this one genetic element that people say looks very suspicious. It seems to play a role in respiratory transmission. And the worry was that because it looks like this element has been inserted in sequence comparison. It seems to be new there. But also nature can do this insertion.

and doesn't have to be a genetic engineer. There was a lot of suspicion around this till this day. Turns out, the four-in-cleavage site actually could not have been created by a designer because sub-mechanistic studies later found that the four-in-cleavage side has this synergy to other proximate genetic elements that no designer did know about in 2019. They couldn't have known about. They couldn't have designed even if they knew about it

because viruses are very complex 3D structures, right? But nature can, of course, because nature, you know, has trillions of trials and errors and sometimes you happen upon these synergistic elements and synergies that allow the virus to suddenly, you know, grow out and outcompete all the others. So this is a very compelling argument also that the foreign cleavage site, for example, was not artificially created, but in fact was coming out of nature. Let me just summarize to say that all the scientific evidence that is verified by multiple people, multiple studies that is internally consistent and coherent with everything we know about viruses, virology, genetics, engineering, whatever, all points. in one direction and only in one direction. There's not one, there's not a single piece of evidence that points in the other. On the laboratory side, we have no supportive evidence as all.

We have a lot of evidence that contradicts it scientifically. We have a lot of human testimony and human intel that contradicts it. And all we have on this side at best is speculations and what if, like, you know, what if, you know, allegations. But there is no argument. Yeah, you did an incredible job there. I think summarizing a very complex thing. I mean, that was really good. I think I'm really helpful.

Certainly refresh my memory about a bunch of stuff I once was vaguely aware of and has since forgotten. I mean, a couple of ironies sort of stand out to me. One of the ironies is that everyone's suspecting conspiracies and proposing cover-ups and so on. And in actual fact, to some degree, there was a very bland and obvious, boring kind of attempted cover-up going on, which is that the Chinese government was not particularly happy about the wet market being the source of this virus. in fact, they enacted trade sanctions on Australia because Australia was calling for more of investigation into the sources of it because it's, you know, culturally embarrassing. It's not the image that the modern, powerful image that I want to project on the international

scene. So it's kind of ironic that the conspiracy theorists, they write the sense, but they got the wrong, as always, they pick their wrong thing. The other sad irony is that, as you briefly explained that Wuhan Institute of Virology was there and doing that work because they've been aware for a long time about the severe danger of zoonotic spillover of viruses from that's and other sorts of populations and so they were there doing this work which of course made it look like they were like in the minds of some to be with the smoking gun in their hand precisely because they were correct in their belief that there was a strong danger and that. So yeah, some very sad ironies there. But the question I have for you is you've done a great job describing the gradual

consolidation of scientific evidence and how consensus, for one of the better word, gradually gets achieved on any scientific problem. And it's often represented in the public and in the media and conspiracy theorist that the scientific consensus is like some sort of, like there's some decree handed down by Fauci or someone else. And then all the scientists say, Oh, right, oh, better. This is the party lining with it. And it's obviously not that. It's exactly that kind of gradual triangulation of evidence

and attempting to actively disprove the most preferred hypothesis until you simply can't anymore and you've sort of eliminated the other options. Can I jump in on this one? Because I feel like this is a very critical point to understand. So some of the protagonists that are also in the book, we talk about the microborobi, we talk about the flow, the bar. These are people that started on the lab. site. I mean, Michael Warby very famously wrote the letter in science saying, initiated the

letter and saying, saying, let's give the leplic hypothesis another scientific look because he was not satisfied with the outcome of the WHO mission. Florence DeBarre, she was part of the French commission on the origin of the virus, you know, also very strongly lab origin favored. Both of them, basically, upon investigating deeper and deeper, they could not accommodate any Leblik hypothesis anymore and basically contributed a lot of work in understanding this evidence and saying, look, the evidence points in a different direction. I mean, Mike Warby, I think he said that, you know, if it had turned out differently, he would have looked much better because he was the guy that initiated this LeBlig saying

that even caused the intelligence agencies to have another look at it, right? I mean, the science letter was part of the contributing fact that the Biden administration would then send the intelligence agency to do their 90-day assessment, right? So Michael Warby was the guy there. And then he worked, you know, months and months and months in his basement in the summer of 2021, reconstructing each early case we had in December of 2019, trying to figure out who were these persons, how were they diagnosed, where do they live, and plotted each trajectory like from 150, 50 early cases

because he wanted to prove that they are not related to the market. Turns out they were because the either had an epidemiological correlation to the market. meaning they were somehow shopping at the market, you know, related to the market, going to the market. Or, and this is the other thing, they were living around the market very close in geographic proximity because it started kind of community spread from the market outward, right? And if you think about, you know, it's good to have this heterodoxy and this controversy, I would say, up front, scientists were not all like, let's never look at the Laptic hypothesis because it might look bad. It's the opposite.

They're like, this is an interesting idea. Let's follow up and let's try to disprove it. So I think this is a lot of big in, and it is suggested, especially by guru types and others, that scientists are not like that. They have a preferred narrative that they want to support when, in fact, that's not the case at all. At least in this specific story that I investigated very deeply, we had many scientists that started on the Laptic side. Christian Anderson is another example. He was the first one to raise the alarm already in beginning of February. They got the intelligence agencies involved.

Eddie Holmes reached out to the Australian intelligence. services to say, oh, fuck, this looks like it could be engineered, you know, given how little information they had in the beginning of 2020, they escalated it to the FBI, to the MI6, to the Australian intelligence services, to raise the alarm, to bring this on the map. And now people turn around and say, ah, these people are all part of the cover-up. So it's really a historic injustice sometimes how some of these scientists have been treated that I feel like if people just read the real story and understand, you know, what happened in this chronological fashion and you know you have the primary testimony what they said what

they said to colleagues i mean i i had to kind of also you know i i never have like a journalist you cannot have just one source telling how things were i always had to kind of figure out and match you know like the fauchy teleconference this famous teleconference i talked to multiple people that were part of it i i everybody i asked them hey tell me your side what what happened there and then i compared notes right what did they say to me then i looked into the foyer released documentations. Ah, what emails did they write? Did this match what people told me, right?

So you really have to reconstruct some of these events and there's no big mystery. So, you know, once you interview people that were in the meeting, when you see what was the output and why they wrote things the way they did, it all is very coherent. And this book tries to create a bit of this coherence that you don't get by hearing only parts of the allegations. It's like, ah, you know, one famous allegations like, our Christian Anderson was waiting for a grant from Anthony Fauci. And so, of course, he switched his mind to go with the preferred sonotic narrative.

And then, actually, this is not how grantmaking work. Anthony Fauci has no control over this grantmaking request. Anderson was completely on the other side and he changed his mind, given the evidence came in at this particular day. I mean, we have the dates. I drew down the dates. Eddie Holmes sent him, you know, I have this former postdoc student. He found this pangolin sequences.

Have a look. Alice Hughes sent via a different Chinese collaborator, I think I should not name him here. They identified this close ancestor that's very close to SARS-CoV-2 in two parts of the genome. They sent it to Eddie Holmes. Eddie Holmes sent this to Christian Anderson and say, look, and then they're like, oh, my God, now it's clear. The mystery is solved that, you know, if we have this in nature, then clearly a recommendation accounted for it. So this is how they changed their mind, and then they published this Proximal Origins paper. It was not anything Fauci said.

Fauci didn't see much at the conference at all. He and Francis calling, they were sitting back and letting the scientists have a debate. And then they say, after the conference, they say, ah, we are like 50-50. Let's keep an open mind. Let's keep investigating. And then they did investigate. They collected evidence. And then they came out with proximal origin that said we cannot exclude the lab origin,

but there's a bunch of evidence that points the other direction. That was it. And this was such a huge controversy then after made to look like, ah, this is where they came together to the cover up. thing with the proximal origin paper as well. And it just, this always struck me as like illustrative of the nature of the discourse around the topic is like, you know, you have figures like Nate Silver and others who are really, really villainizing the proximal origin paper and calls for retraction, all this kind of thing. But first of all, there's the issue that none of them,

almost nobody that I saw online that is commenting on that paper seemed too bother to read it. It was like four pages long. The way that they characterized it was that it ruled out that there can be any further investigation on the topic. It completely claimed that it had found

conclusive evidence. And like you can literally read it saying this is the current, where the current evidence stands, this is where we've drawn this conclusion. Of course, if more evidence comes that contradicts any of this or the new evidence comes to light. We need to revise it. And in any case, we should continue investigating because we're in the early stage.

So they said on our assessment of the current evidence is this. So this is why we don't think it's likely. But more evidence may come to light and we may need to revise if additional stuff comes. And that's it. And that is presented as if, well, that was the scientific community forbidding any future research. And you can tell that they didn't do that because lots of the people involved went on to do additional research exactly on that question. But the other aspect of that, that proximal origin paper, and I think this relates to, you did a very good job, Phil, like Matt said, of laying out,

you know, a whole bunch of evidence. I know there's so many moving parts here. But in terms of the reaction and the public discourse around it, so things were, like the proximal origin paper becomes Totemic or Anthony Fauci becomes like the single figure. He's the only person really that matters for, you know, kind of Joe Rogan or people like that. And if the proximal origin paper was retracted, right, like if it turned out that actually they had of, you know, been scheming behind the scenes and they'd misrepresented what they actually fought and they were doing it all for political reasons, it wouldn't undermine any of the other vast amounts of independent evidence.

lines that have accrued for the Lamblake. But the people in the Lamblick world seem to regard, you know, individuals and single papers as these kind of linchments that like if they can just discredit that, that will completely destruct the whole edifice that has kind of been manufactured in order to silence the dissent. And this speaks to me and it was kind of one of the things that I was curious about is given what you've just described in some of your previous answers around the continuous buildup of evidence of independent lines pointing in the same direction, the same location.

How is it that the public discourse has not gone that way, right? To me, there's a clear disconnect from the way this issue is perceived in opinion polling and whatnot shows, you know, I think the majority of the American public think that it came from a lab, certainly the majority of podcasters. think that's the case. So why do you think that has occurred, right? That like basically to a certain extent, it seems like scientists and science communicators lost the public information battle. And I know you're fighting back, so I'm not saying it's completely hopeless, but just I wonder what your thoughts are around that. So I have a lot of thoughts about this. I mean, this is also this is kind

of the key theme of the book, right? I mean, the science is kind of smuggled in because I know, people would not necessarily read a science book, people would read a book that's a bit more spicy about, you know, media manipulators, about disinformation campaigns. And I collected some of these, and some of these were not necessarily as public or they are not put in the right context, some of these events that happened in major media outlets, with some of the gurus, with some genuine disinformation campaigns. I mean, one of the big highlights, I would say that I worked out a bit deeper is, for example, the whole story about how did the bioweapon myth start? And this has everything to do with the MAGA movement. This has to do with Steve Bannon and Maasguo.

Miles Guo is an exiled Chinese real estate mogul, a billionaire that had to flee China after Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign was basically sowing his influence and power. And so before they arrested him, he basically fled. And he found a new home in Mao Lago in the Mao Lago crowd in the Maga movement in the US. And in 2018 already, he and Steve Bannon worked together. And I think he paid Steve Bannon like a million or so to go into the media business. And he created Google Media, which is this network of fringe outlets to a certain extent conspiratorial outlets that would also kind of provide information in Chinese for the Chinese

diaspora, so expats in China against the Communist Party. It's like an anti-Chinese Communist Party. Like the Epoch Times kind of thing? Like the Epoch Times, exactly. I mean, they are also connected somewhat in some, they have overlapping characters. They're in their right-wing-maga movement and this anti-communist, anti-Chinese party affiliates.

And it's not to say that the Chinese Communist Party is great. I'm just saying this is how they positioned themselves. Important qualifier. And what happened basically is that there was this postdoc in Hong Kong called Dr. Li Meng Yang, and she had this suspicion early on that it could have been a bioweapon created by the Chinese military based on very limited information, again, on bad viruses that were found by a Chinese military academy that seemed to be related to SARS-CoV-2, but much more distantly related than the other viruses that we talked about, too

distant to have created SARS-CoV-2. And so she spun this theory and kind of got in contact with one of the chief propagandists of Miles Gou's media operation called a YouTuber called Lou D and he basically picked her up and they started amplifying her suspicions and her bioweapon kind of allegations more and more and then you know the coup behind this whole thing was of course that Miles Gou and Steve Bannon organized for this whistleblower to go away from London they bought her a first class ticket to the US they housed her they trained they had a media trainer because her English was not good, to train her, and then they put her somehow, and I tried to investigate how exactly the first appearance happened on Fox News, but she immediately got a kind of

an interview with Fox News, probably arranged via this network somehow, and immediately exploded into the scene. I mean, the New York Times would later report that Miles Gould and Steve Bannon created a right-wing media sensation. This is what she was, right, in this critical election year of 2020. The pandemic was not shaking out well for Trump, for the Republican movement, so they needed a counter-narrative. And Scarlett was elevated to this counter-narrative by blaming not the failings of the pandemic response on the Trump administration, but blaming the whole pandemic on China. And so a lot of the 2020 discos were shaped by the most powerful man in office to basically say, ah, the pandemic is not my fault. You know, voters should not blame me. They should blame China.

And there was a coordinated campaign behind this. And ultimately, we had a lot of the bioweapon stories escalating throughout 2020 that won a lot of partisans over. And once you have a certain force, I would say, of believers, then it's very hard to get rid of a narrative again, especially something that's emotionally so capturing is like what caused the pandemic, who is to blame. So this is, I would say that one part of this. And just to finish on this story, so what people don't understand is what did the manipulators in the back gain from it, right? Of course, it was a media stunt to help the Trump administration, but it was also a huge fraud on the Chinese diaspora and the Maga movement that got sucked into this goo media ecosystem because

he would then, you know, advertise them to crypto schemes, investment opportunities, you know, Chi member platinum leadership. They created this cult around this Chinese tycoon that are we going to take down the CCP and replace the Chinese government. And so people bought into that. And ultimately, the Southern District of New York charged MISCOO. I think it's still ongoing what's going to happen to him, or if it gets a pardon, most likely, unfortunately. But they defrauded basically these believers in the bioweapon story, they defrauded them up to the tune of a $1 billion. And Miles Gou would buy, you know, a yard for $300 million and a villa for, I don't know, $35 million and would grow expensive cars based on abusing this emotional story about the bioweapon to reel in more and more people. putting Scarlett onto Fox News and Tucker Carlson, you know, so that people would come into their media universe and get, you know, offered all these lucrative investment opportunities, get rich, quick schemes and similar.

So this is the dark underbelly that I also look into why some of these actors were not, you know, interested in the controversy as much as manipulating people for their own strategic and financial gains. And we see this, of course, then there's other influences that during the pandemic, you know, became very famous. expanded the power by being very contrarian to vaccines, pushing either marketing, miracle cures, and then also jumping on the Lab League story. And unfortunately, I have to report that many of these actors that played the role or tried to hedge their reputation to the Lab League are now in power. I mean, Cheapadacharya, he is now the head of NIH. The Labelik story has been used to justify funding cuts to the NIH.

But Acharya was part of biosafety now, which is this extremist organization that's supposedly for biosafety, but it's an anti-biotechnology, antivirology pressure organization, basically. And he is now in power. Radcliffe, John Radcliffe is the head of the CIA now, who has been working ever since with the Trump administration to push the bioweapon story, to work with the Heritage Foundation, the all sorts behind Project 2025. he was working for their origin commission to basically blame the pandemic on China, to escalate tensions with China as part of their policy agenda.

So you see these characters, they benefited a lot from pushing this narrative. And this story is not usually told. It's usually told in a way of, like, are scientists, you know, did never accept this opportunity? No, it was never really investigated. And all the good people that asked questions were censored by the Biden regime and similar. And in reality, you know, there's a lot of power plays that happened in the back that people were not aware about. And so the book also does this.

And maybe this is a good point to also point out. And this is what got me into trouble with my publisher in the U.S. ultimately when they got back into power. So I had the publisher in the U.S. very small press that was associated with a very prestigious college in the United States. They loved the book. The editors said, it's fantastic. The story needs to be told. And then the Trump administration won and these people that are some. sometimes characterize them a book, not, you know, overtly negatively, but just pointing

out this is what we have, what these people did. They are now back in power and the lawyers basically killed the book after that. They said, look, first they were like, I said, you know, given this, you know, should we get better legal insurance just to be protected for the book? And then the lawyers were like, you know, just outline pleas on each chapter, you know, where you think there might be a concern. And so I gave them basically a list of my antagonists for each chapter. we have one, two, three antagonists.

And I give them the list, I think, like, not even half a day later. They were like, nope, and the editor, the chief editor, not the editor that still tried to get the book to a bigger publisher to target it. But the editor was like, nope, we're not going to do that. It's too risky. And unfortunately, they were correct, given how the crackdown on academia and science and defunding of universities, any kind of negative spotlight could defund them. And they were afraid for their jobs.

They were afraid for lawsuits that would not entangle just the printing press itself. but the whole college. And this is what the lawyer wrote me, right? You know, we cannot publish this book because this would put not only our jobs, but the whole college into jeopardy. And so that book got killed. Otherwise, the book won't be sooner.

Yeah, I think it's worth noting that Philip in a little bit more detail just to make the comparison because, like, the individual success of a particular book, whatever, you know, I mean, obviously for you, right, it would be a significant blow. But like the context there is fears about an administration that will attack with the tools of the state and the resources of just large amounts of money and whatnot, but to put pressure on people who want to report

about what they did, right? This is the same thing as Jonathan Howard published a book, documenting what people were saying during COVID. And a lot of the people, you know, reacted very negatively to that. But he was just documenting the various claims they'd made and how they had. hadn't held up. And this includes people like Vinay Prasad, who also went on to get a position in the Trump administration. So the interesting thing is like all of the lab-league discourse rests on, in my view, there's like so many parallels with other conspiracy communities. Like I noticed at the very early stages, this looks a lot like the 9-11 trooper movement. It looks a lot like the anti-vaccine movement. There's a lot of the same characteristics occurring there. And then

you have within that the kind of emergence of like the celebrity figures right the people that are bored up by it and get raised profiles and if you compare your experience with say for example alina chan and matt ridley who not only had a book published which is strongly leaning towards lab leak being the actual place but did a media tour you know promoted across large but much larger podcast than us, notably, you know, like Sam Harris. And that's part of the reason that we had the original guys on. But, but in all those cases, their profiles were raised. And in comparison to the way they presented, that they would be hounded out of positions, they wouldn't be allowed, right? But Jay Batatariah was not removed from his academic position. Vinay Prasad

was still in his position as well. And they were all rewarded. So while you have faced and other people, you know, have the potential for, if not just harassment, just, you know, various obstacles being putting in the way. Yeah, I have to say, if I can interrupt here. Yeah. So this is something that really also was shocking to me is like, you know, I'm in Switzerland. Nothing really can happen to me here. Nobody cares.

Not so heated here. You guys are neutral. But that's why I can still speak out. But that doesn't mean that you don't have these extremist communities that try to, you know, My old boss from my old company got contacted about, you know, trying to get me fired based on just me advocating for giving the science on the origin, basically taking it seriously and giving it another look, right? I had reporters investigating with Peter Dashek from the New York Times because a conspiracy series said that Equal of Alliance would pay me. So he had to basically do a Q&A with New York Times reporters to prove that he actually did not. pay me, that there is no correlation between, you know, there's no quid pro quo that I'm just

naive and idealistic and talk about this out of my own volition and my own agency, that this is not a big conspiracy theory. And so it's very hard to, if you're just, you know, like this and you're already, and there's countless memes about me and, you know, harassment and whatever, I don't care about all of this. So I'm in the fortunate situation. I don't have to care about this. But for the scientists, especially people know, yes, I mean, they had to change addresses.

They had to scrap the internet of private information for worry that people would come and shoot them up. Peter Dash specifically, I mean, he had the FBI guy that he's in Congress. He said he never seen anything like this, right? There's threats he gets from domestic terror organizations, white powder letters, swarting. Like, swarting is when basically people call and he said, like, ah, I'm a scientist. I have my wife, you know, in the basement and I'm going to kill her. And so the police comes with six police cars in the middle of the night, raiding his house. right and you know how they come they say i have a gun they come in guns blazing if he react poorly

could end deadly so this is called did that happen this happened to pittadesh i guess so in that contrast and like with the things that you pointed out so the book documents it but for those that haven't read it and you've just talked about it briefly but the impact on the scientists right involved here you know as as you outlined as well at the beginning these are the scientists that have dedicated their lives in many occasions to trying to public help prevent viruses from becoming pandemics. And the reward for that, in part, was to be publicly vilified and targeted. So you mentioned, like, you know, Peter Dashett and the swatting and yourself, right, facing harassment online. But are there any other examples that come to mind of stories

or illustrative cases of what scientists face for being involved in this? Yes. I mean, there's many. collected many of them. And it's, you know, we talk about Christian Anderson who got dragged in front of Congress by Republicans for a pony show. And I have to say they really did well, right? So they were in the testimony. They really didn't give the Republicans anything.

They defended themselves super well. And then as a retribution, the Republicans abused their power to subpoena their private slack messages and leaked this to client propagandists as associated with them to hear private messages from scientists. Let's look if you can find something and basically smear them in that way. This is Michael Schellenberger and others. Metaibi that basically do client. They then created this story that basically still up to today tarnished their reputation

of a Christian Anderson based on the contextual private messages that nobody ever read. But, you know, this is... I read them. You read them. And you see there's nothing suspicious in these private messages. And there's the organization called U.S. right to know, which is originally a left-leaning anti-GMO organization, this is their playbook. They basically go, they defoyer communications from scientists looking for anything they

can decontorectualize and pick to kind of do character assassinations of these scientists publicly. And unfortunately, all of the scientists that are somewhat in this topic and had somewhat of a public profile, they all got swept up into this tornado. They got their reputations tarnished. Sometimes, you know, funding was cut, people lost their jobs, especially when we talk about EcoF Alliance and their environment, but also others. So, you know, universities that had nothing to do with this, there were programs that

in the beginning of the pandemic were funded, I think UC Davis and others, that were trying to do more virus hunting, more virus sampling in order to better predict this risky animal-human interfaces. The funding got pooled rapidly once people started pressuring agencies to remove funding for these programs, right? So there's a long tale of bad consequences for scientists that go beyond the person or that go towards systemic suppression of research fields, sabotaging of public understanding, manipulating the public. And now, I mean, the whole dismantling of the NIH is partly argumented for first because they are to woke and protrans. And the second big argument,

and these are the only two arguments ever put forward, is because they did the pandemic. They They funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they did the research, Ralph Barak, blah, blah, whatever. They created the pandemic. This is completely at odds with all the evidence we have. We can very strongly exclude any engineering, having any role in this, but this is still used to basically defund the agencies, take away all the independence of scientific organizations and scientific agencies, trying to go to war with universities. This is all justified as part of. of this larger anti-science aggression we are seeing. And the Laplique story is the one thing that people always fall back to when people push against

this. When they say, look, is this justifies this well? And they say, ah, did it the Laplique? This has now been proven. Blah, blah, blah. Actually, it has not been proven. The opposite is all but certain, I would say. So, yeah, it's a very dire environment that people operate in.

And it's also beyond the U.S., right, it's scientists like Marion Kubman, who was part of the WHO mission facing very similar problems. having her students interrogated by right wingers in parliament because unfortunately this is also part of the book says you know we're interconnected now and these story tropes they spread across countries across languages and scientists all around the world face consequences Eddie Holmes sitting in Australia and you know nice to your place as Matt will tell you he gets sabotaged by you know people taking his institutional email address and you know basically registering him every day to a bunch of fraud and scam services, basically completely in activating his academic email address because every day has to get the scam stuff. At the height of the congressional investigations, you have the Murdoch Media Empire hitting down on Eddie Holmes. He had a security incident at his house in Australia because the murder press was putting him with Christian Anderson and the other proxmergen also says, ah, they did it. They hit it, right? So all around the world, you see this. And of course,

we haven't even talked about, and this is also very sensitive to talk about, the scientists in China themselves. They are not all part of the cover-up. Many Chinese scientists try to keep, you know, conversation open with their Western collaborators. Some of the best information we got out is via some backhanded kind of channels to Western collaborators from Chinese scientists. And they faced the brunt of it. I mean, we outlined Ellis Hughes that had to basically flee China on foot because, you know, she might not have made it out otherwise crossing the border to Hong Kong by foot with just a backpack full of 34 hard drives with her research data because there was such a severe pressure on her from the Chinese state to not do bad sampling, to not investigate

the origins, any deeper, the natural origins. They didn't do that for the Lablich because in China themselves, the Lablich story was working in the favor of the state because it was seen by the Chinese population as Americans just doing bioweapons stuff that's clearly not true and it was countered with saying ah it came out of u.s biotechnology chief sex is a person that you know the chinese state likes to amplify about this it came out of fort dietrich it came to wuhan they are the victims so the chinese state adopted the kind of victim narrative that the pandemic did not start in china it was brought into china and started there we were the first victims and so it doesn't match when scientists say look the wildlife trade

beds in China have close ancestors of this virus. The China state doesn't want to hear any of it. They don't want to hear any about the wet market, potentially being the source of the outbreak. The China state very clearly doesn't want any of this to happen. They censor it also actively. You have reached messages deleting. I mean, I have testimony from people I cannot name from also independent Western journalists in China that say, look, there's a huge suppression effort that nobody can say that the pandemic started at the wet market. That censorship doesn't happen when it comes from the lab somehow, because that still works in the favor of public perception.

I don't understand all the games they are playing, but this is seen as unreasonable, so that's why it's allowed to stand. What is seen as reasonable is not allowed to stand. So there is more to this, and I don't want to go too deep into this because the book does not rely on Chinese sources too much. It doesn't rely on unverified Chinese evidence. It doesn't need to rely on it, luckily, because of the evidence we accumulated outside and other testimony.

And we have a lot of evidence that is verified independently, that originally was produced by Chinese authors, but we don't go into politics. I try to, because I'm in Switzerland. You know, I'm in a famously neutral country. There's a clear interest from a Chinese state to push a certain origin narrative and there's a clear interest from the U.S. government to push a certain origin narrative. And I'm in Switzerland.

I can be the neutral party in that sense. and extrapolate between what are they saying, what I actually signed the saying, what does the evidence support, and what did we learn on the other side? What were the antagonists doing? What was their basis for doing it? And there was not a strong basis.

Usually there was a financial, strategic, a political, an ideological motive to push the Labelic story, to gain popularity, to gain profit or gain power. And this is what the book outlines. And I think this is why it's not picked up by people that are profited from spreading the Labelik's, theory because they probably are not super interested in hearing the other side of this story. Yeah, it's definitely one of those situations where you have all of these vast political media

and social psychological forces at play pushing in certain directions. And they're not all kind of nefarious ones. You know, some of them are just normal everyday human ones. So this was an important point for my book. It's not about blame. So I was part of this documentary movie called blame, but it kind of lays out how every pandemic is followed by blame and conspiracy series. So this is somewhat natural. Humans want to have an agent to blame. And this is also very important for me to understand that people who might believe a lab origin is likely or believed, you know, there are good points being made. These are not conspiracy theories. This is not the people I talk about. I really talk about the people that spend 16 hours a day doing propaganda,

trying to convince others actively by creating fraudulent argument, fraudulent papers to buy into this worldview. These are for me the people that my scorn goes towards and they're amplifiers that do it for personal gain. Normal people, most people don't care, realistically, one way or the other, you know, many people ask me, what does it matter? I mean, the pandemic unfolded. It doesn't matter if it started, you know, with the first infection from a bed or the first infection from a lab. We still could have reacted a bit differently together. But yeah, this focus on blame and focus on our natural tendency and how it is abused by manipulators, this I think, is a key theme of the book. And this is how the gurus come back into it, because they are masters in picking up

the emotional salience of certain narratives and know how to play to their audience to convince them of their story, of their worldview. And this is something that scientists completely lack. Scientists cannot do it. They say, ah, you know, all the evidence points in one way, but, you know, there is no strong proof because we cannot prove in it, blah, blah, blah, and people are lost emotionally. And then the others come in that say, oh, I understand something has gone wrong for years now. or they pick up on the grievances, they pick up on that, and then they start spinning their own

narratives. We've seen this with the vaccines, of course, and we've seen this with the story. And now I want also to let you talk a little bit about your observations about this, because this was really helpful for my book, and especially Chapter 9, where we really talk about how the gurusphere, the secular gurus, were key in getting the Lab League narrative kind of cemented in public discourse. Well, obviously, I think you're right. Everything you just said is, is correct you know it's both things all at once on one hand you have the natural human tendency you want to find an agent preferably when you already kind of dislike to blame on the bad

thing it's very unsatisfying for it to be a bit nebulous all of the scientific evidence is very boring and too technical and you know stuff around bats is not emotionally compelling and as you said public figures whether you're writing a book like viral the search for the origins of COVID, like Alina Chan or Ridley, or whether you're the gurus hosting a podcast or whatever, they're tapping into the same energy. It sells. One narrative sells well, and the other one doesn't. Actually, at the moment, I'm reading a book called The Great Mortality by John Kelly, which is about the black death in Europe. And, you know, as everyone knows, the infection and the deaths was quickly followed by some of the most vicious killings of Jewish people,

programs and so on that are quite harrowing to read you know just awful and you know you had the same thing there like you had some actors like who were faking documents and making up a you know stories about them poisoning wells and things like that but then you had the populace who wanted to believe you know and you know the jews are a perfect perfect scapegoat there but look we we could go on about this all day i mean one good thing for people it's a misfortune for you because of the publishers being afraid of the legal action but it's a benefit for people who are interested in your book because I believe that we can link them to an online copy that they can read for free. Is that right, Philip?

That is correct. So I long give up on making any profit out of this book. This is never the goal anyways. This was something that I feel I have to do to correct the record and to get this injustice somewhat remedied, at least the little I can. And I always wanted this to be as widely accessible as possible. I always offered people, even when the book was there, that I would send them. you know, any information, any copy, all the information I get at if they're interested in. But now since the publisher is gone, I don't have any limitations.

And the internet is like, why not put all the book online? I made a serialized novel out of the book now. So I have 12 chapters. Each week I publish a new chapter. I think now we are almost done. We are like a chapter 10. And people can listen to it. So I have an AI audio translation because some people listen to books, then read it.

And I have it also online. I have, you know, each chapter as a PDF version, high quality, with, you know, fancy quotes and stuff like that. People can just go on the website, Leplech fever, and download it for free. I have the book as a Kindler version, like eBook version, and as a print version. There, on Amazon, I cannot influence the price. So the problem is if people want to read the book and they still will have to go on Amazon and buy some. But if there are people like in Brazil, in India, you can reduce the ebook price to like, you know, I don't know, two rupees, very little or two reaish in Brazil, so people can get it basically for the equivalent,

I don't know, of 20 or 50 cent or something like the e-book, if they want to read it. So for me, it's really important to make it accessible so that people who really, because the pandemic hit all of us, they hit all communities, it changed us in ways we have not fully understood. Having one account, one honest answer of people really trying to understand where it came from, I think is important. Yeah, I think it's a great story. I mean, it's sad that in the current situation, the bad guys have kind of won, in a way, the anti-science movement is currently winning. But this kind of thing is going to happen again. You know, this isn't the first time there's been dramatic public misunderstanding of scientific evidence. It's not

the only time and it's going to happen again. And I think the best way we can encourage people to resist it is by reading books like yours. So, yep, we endorse it here on Decoding the Gurus. And Philip, you've explained it all incredibly well. I think you've, and your book is just as compelling to read. So thanks very much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. And it's hopefully not the last time that we see you, but maybe over the long haul, Philip. So I'm currently doing my next big thing. So don't worry about it. It's going to be another five years. I feel the overall goal, you know, like I've heard people talk about this

and like, are we doomed that historically the conspiracy version will win out that like the the narrative is that the scientists restricted everything and that you weren't allowed to talk about the potential of Lablich and that's what actually occurred. But I'm more optimistic. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think, you know, cooler heads will prevail in the long arc of history. Exactly. You know, only if people like me at least give one account of how it could be different, right? And exactly, at least locally in Switzerland, there's now a big journal from like one of the most renowned journalistic outlets for high quality journalism. They picked up now my book and they also interviewed some of the scientists again to kind

of tell this story based on because they read my book. So you see that there is some movement, at least in some circles. I'll also give you an optimistic note related to what I observe around the guru's fear and the discourse is that whenever something. becomes, you know, widely accepted or the discourse is that this is the case. This gives journalists and long-form writers the chance to say, everybody thought that this was like this. But actually, when you look at it, it was this represented. So later down the line, or, you know, in the coming years after the Trump administration, fingers crossed, I think there will be retrospectives where people

say, oh, you know, like the kind of another wave of discourse, which is just like the waves that go through the New York Times saying, oh, it looks like Lab Lake was vindicated or, you know, is much more plausible. There will be eventually, I feel, a time when people are like, actually the common perception of this is wrong. And people like writing those articles. So that might, the contrarian wave may eventually hit the Lab Lake people. But as the only, the only one, the only way, you know, point on the guru discourse I'll make and and this is a like a pessimistic note to to add is that it is not done that dilablic will ever go away it is now conspiracy lore like jfk assassinations or the moon landing any number it's it's now it's conspiracy lore and for that reason it also serves as an

indicator often about you know people's kind of susceptibility to a whole range of things not entirely but yeah when people are hardcore lab liquors it is rare that that's the only issue where they have that view on so so yeah so continue continue your work philp and i'll post links to all the materials that people can see there's a like online book format that you can get from amazon and there are the individual chapters on the website and yeah it's i appreciate you taking the time with us and uh yeah we will see you again. I'm sure we will see you again. Yeah, I would be in your Patreon again at some point. Oh, no, not. I meant to work the next project that I could have fake, but...

Oh, the next project. Yeah, I mean, this is fantastic, but I cannot tell too much, but, you know, just talking about, you know, very renowned people, talk to the Cyber Minister of Taiwan. There we go. Okay, that's a teaser. It's a teaser. Stay tuned, everyone. Yeah, well, thanks very much. All right, guys. Thank you, good, good news. Thank you so much.

Bye. Bye. We're going to be able to be. Thank you.